Kurzgesagt is one of the most popular YouTube channels, with over 23.6 million subscribers, and individual videos often getting millions of views. The videos tend to be on the topic of science, philosophy, culture - sometimes overlapping with Effective Altruism themes.
Their most recent video covers factory farming, focussing on the economic reasons why conditions on factory farms exist and what consumers of meat can do to make better choices.
One of the issues that negates growth in the ethical meat market is that it is essentially competing on two fronts. On one front you have people who don't consider the ethics of what they're eating, and on the other end you have people that care so much about animals that they don't eat animals at all.
This means that the market for ethical meat exists in a narrow band between these two groups, and may always struggle to reach critical mass. If, for instance, the ethical market is 10% but 5% of people are vegan, that's half your ethical market gone, meaning you lose many economies of scale, and also you lose an opportunity to grow, because the more concerned people become about animal welfare the more people will also become vegan or vegetarian, in one door, out the other. I'm not suggesting of course that vegans should eat meat in order to bolster the market, just that it's a tricky issue for this reason.
I think the video does a good job of trying to broaden that narrow band, by focusing on animal welfare rather than the body-count of animals. This might be a good approach. I can almost imagine a world where everyone is vegan, but I can much more easily imagine a world where 10% of people are vegan, but where 100% of the meat is ethically grown, which would be an immeasurably better situation than the one we have at present (until of course we consider the environmental impacts). So, although it's a tricky issue, it's worth pursuing.
Perhaps there are many in EA. My prior guess would be that many mainstream vegans feel disgust towards animal flesh itself. I know anecdotally that’s how I felt. Motivated as much by considerations of the sacred and the profane and sentiment as anything else. Already empathetic as a person, I was therefore prone to reactions like that.
This is on top of the marketing nightmare of getting people to accept “unnatural, lab-grown meat.” It reminds me of anti-nuclear environmentalist campaigners. And conservationists, motivated by a pristine wilderness that never existed. Sometimes, it is not a rational thing. Emotions and symbols drive things.
I was excited that they did this and thought it was well produced. The focus on cost cutting feels like a double edged sword: it absolves viewers of responsibility, which makes them more open to the message but also less likely to do anything. I scrolled through the first couple pages of comments and saw a bunch of "corporations are greedy" complaints but couldn't find anyone suggesting a concrete behavioral change (for themselves or others).
I wonder if there's an adjacent version of this which keeps the viewer absolved of responsibility but still has a call to action. Plausible ideas:
In any case, kudos to the Kurzgesagt team for making a video on this which (as of this writing) has 2M+ views!
Perhaps there are many in EA. My prior guess would be that many mainstream vegans feel disgust towards animal flesh itself. I know anecdotally that’s how I felt. Motivated as much by considerations of the sacred and the profane and sentiment as anything else. Already empathetic as a person, I was therefore prone to reactions like that.
This is on top of the marketing nightmare of getting people to accept “unnatural, lab-grown meat.” It reminds me of anti-nuclear environmentalist campaigners. And conservationists, motivated by a pristine wilderness that never existed. Sometimes, it is not a rational thing. Emotions and symbols drive things.